How weddings got (even more) expensive

I have been a bridesmaid six times. I’ve traveled across the country and outside of it to see my friends get married. I’ve planned bachelorette parties in New Orleans and gone to bridal showers in Arizona. I love love. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. But it adds up: the dresses, the flights, the gift.

According to Karen Dunak, a history professor at Muskingum University and author of As Long as We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America, weddings used to be a whole lot simpler. “It was very much a community kind of thing, even sometimes just your immediate family,” she told Vox. “People would have traditional celebrations relying on the local landscape or flowers available in the yard or the community.”

White wedding gowns became popular in the 1920s, but the wedding as we currently know it began to emerge after World War II. As Dunak explains, there was “a leaning into consumer expenditure, consumer display, and being part of an America that’s very much about prosperity and plenty, and the wedding is a location where Americans are able to display that.”

Today, there are few places where that display is more visible than Vogue’s online wedding photo essays. “They’re a big feature with an edit of maybe about 40 to 80 photos from the wedding,” Shelby Wax, a contributing weddings editor at Vogue, told Vox. “Then we also have a wonderful feature where we talk about your love story, the entire process of planning the wedding, your experience, and how you felt on the day.”

So what goes into a modern wedding? How much are some people spending? What’s worth focusing on? We talk with Wax about that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to as****@*ox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

Does a wedding need to be super expensive to get into Vogue territory?

Some of the favorite weddings I’ve written up have been under $50,000. I just got one up this week where it was just a couple and they went to New York City Hall and they did a lunch along the way with their families, and it’s so cute and emotional and great.

Sometimes the ones I see that spend a lot of money are really not of the certain caliber I want to feature because it seems like they’re just throwing money at something and it doesn’t feel intentional. My biggest thing I always think is, “When I look at these photos, do I want to be a guest at this wedding?”

Ballpark, what’s the average cost of a wedding these days? Let’s say we’re having 100 guests at this imaginary wedding.

In New York City, the average wedding is probably $100,000: the cost for catering, the cost for photography, flowers, food. If you’re somewhere in the Midwest, I would say the average cost is probably closer to $30,000 to $40,000.

It really depends on the scale and also the vendors you’re choosing. Some of the top wedding photographers in the world charge $100,000, but there’s other ones who charge $5,000, and that’s a very big difference in your bottom-line budget.

You need to think about those things and really be holistic when you’re thinking about your budget. Budgets are one of the most difficult parts of getting married. I’ve never heard someone say they were under budget.

How do wedding trends pop up? Does it come from somewhere like Vogue? Is there a bridal version of the cerulean sweater monologue from The Devil Wears Prada?

I hear from planners that a lot of their Gen Z clients are so focused on social media that they’re really wanting to be on top of the trend cycles. And then they’re saying, “Well, I want to do this brand-new thing,” or “I saw this thing via ChatGPT,” and a lot of times their planners are like, “Well, first off, this isn’t in your budget. This isn’t even possible because this was AI-generated.” Or it just becomes something that’s so overdone.

When it comes to weddings, I feel like there are two things I hear: one, people being obsessed with being original. And then on the other hand, it’s people who don’t want it to be trendy. It needs to look timeless.

The timeless thing is just ubiquitous. I think there’s a degree of tradition that comes with weddings and something classic about them anyway, so I think that’s where people harken to the idea of, “I want it to be timeless. This is something we’re going to be looking at generations ahead, and I want it to still feel cool and beautiful and something that I look at the photos and don’t cringe at.”

I understand it from more that perspective, but you know what? Everything is a time capsule. There’s a degree of people wanting to feel original and unique, but original and unique can often go along with what is popular at the time.

As someone who writes and consults in the wedding industry, have things gotten too extravagant and over the top? Have we kind of lost sight of what’s important?

Yes and no. I think I’m a very big proponent of “do you” and if you want to have a very extravagant wedding and you can reasonably afford it and make it work, great, go for it.

I think a degree of extravagance is okay on your wedding day, because when else are you going to have this big party and all the people you love there. At the same time, do it within reason and keep it authentic as well.